DanStillStands
Seasoned Veteran
Bess has been good all year. He just needed that one break out game to get his name out there for the whole leage to know. I hope they keep him around for a long time
Like many have said...
welker v.2.0 ... the similarities are pretty scary, the only differences i see between those two are skin color and jersey number
only this time, i hope the FO won't be dumb enough to get rid of him
I like Bess, but he not yet anywhere close to Welker. Actually, I think Camarillo and Bess combined = Welker. Camarillo has Welker's route running, hands and toughness. Bess has Welker's quickness.
Davone Bess is a guy that will have to earn his spot in the rotation every year but will probably do so pretty easily.
He's not a vertical threat at all right now. He's a complementary player. Right now his value is limited because he's got nobody to complement. He's Wes Welker without Randy Moss.
What was disconcerting for me is that even though it's easy to look at his latest body of work, the Panthers, Bills and New England games, and talk about how good he is...if you go back to the three or four games before that, all the way until the very end of the Buccaneers game...he was pretty bad. He went through a real rough stretch there that even Wes Welker never went through in his second or third year with us. What I HOPED was that this was just an acclimation period to the new quarterback, and what kind of ball he threw. Ted Ginn may have been something of a lost cause but there had to be hope for Davone Bess to go back to his sticky-fingered ways. Perhaps the most disturbing thing was how he would fumble the ball. That has nothing to do with your quarterback, that's just a player flat out slumping.
I hope he's put all of that behind him for good now, because he does have a lot of potential as a complementary player. In today's NFL, which is going more and more toward spread offense, a player like Bess can be very valuable if he's surrounded with the right cast. Wes Welker is on pace to absolutely shatter the record for receptions over a three-year period. If Bess can get to be that kind of player and he's in an offense with an outside threat, or multiple outside threats, on the same level as a Randy Moss...then look out.
But remember that right now Bess is not Welker. He doesn't think as quickly, he doesn't break as many tackles, and he's not as effective downfield as Welker has suddenly become. He doesn't produce the same YAC. He's in his second year and Welker only exploded in his fourth year. Some might argue that Welker could have exploded in his third year if he had been in the right offense with the right QB. That's probably true. I hope what it means is that when Jeff Ireland gets Stephen Ross the receiver he wants, Bess will explode next year and it will help us go far in the playoffs, maybe even win the Super Bowl.